o

Fi

o Frank Raymond Leavis (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978)

 British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century.

 He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and
later at the University of York.
 His father was a cultured man who ran a shop in Cambridge that sold
pianos and other musical instruments,[ and his son was to retain a
respect for him throughout his life.
 Leavis was educated at a fee-paying independent school (in English
terms a minor public school), The Perse School, whose headmaster was
Dr  Rouse.
 Rouse was a classicist and known for his "direct method", a practice
which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their
pupils in Latin and classical Greek.
 He had some fluency in foreign languages, He felt that his native
language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority.
His extensive reading in the classical languages is not therefore strongly
evident in his work.

 Leavis had won a scholarship from the Perse School to Emmanuel

College,   Cambridge to study history. Britain declared war on
Germany soon after he matriculated, when he was 19. Leavis left
Cambridge after his first year as an undergraduate and joined
the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) at York in 1915.
 After the introduction of conscription in 1916, when his brother Ralph
also joined the FAU, he benefited from the blanket recognition of the
members of the Friends' Ambulance Unit as conscientious objectors. He
is quoted as saying: "But after the Bloody Somme there could be no
question for anyone who knew what modern war was like of joining the
army.
 He worked in France behind the Western Front, carrying a copy
of Milton's poems with him. His wartime experiences had a lasting
effect on him, making him prone to insomnia. He maintained that
exposure to poison gas retained in the clothes of soldiers who had been
gassed damaged his physical health, particularly his digestion. 
 He was slow to recover from the war, and he was later to refer to it as
"the great hiatus". He said: "The war, to put it egotistically, was bad
luck for us.
 On his return from the war in 1919, He changed his field of study to
English and became a pupil in the newly founded English School at
Cambridge. Despite graduating with first-class honours, He was not
seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship and instead
embarked on a PhD, then an unusual career move for an aspiring
academic. In 1924,
 He presented a thesis on The Relationship of Journalism to Literature,
which "studied the rise and earlier development of the press in
England". This work contributed to his lifelong concern with the way in
which the ethos of a periodical can both reflect and form the cultural
aspirations of a wider public.

 His proponents said that he introduced “seriousness" into English

studies, and some English and American university departments were
shaped by his example and ideas.
 He appeared to possess a clear idea of literary criticism, and he was
well known for his decisive and often provocative, and idiosyncratic,
judgements. He insisted that valuation was the principal concern of
criticism, that it must ensure that English literature should be a living
reality operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism
should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility
 His criticism can be grouped into four chronological stages. The first is
that of his early publications and essays, including New Bearings in
English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936). Here he was concerned
 primarily with re-examining poetry from the 17th to 20th centuries, and
this was accomplished under the strong influence of T. S. Eliot. Also
during this early period Leavis sketched out his views about university
education.
 He then turned his attention to fiction and the novel, producing The
Great Tradition (1948) and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Following
this period Leavis pursued an increasingly complex treatment of
literary, educational and social issues. Though the hub of his work
remained literature, his perspective for commentary was noticeably
broadening, and this was most visible in Nor Shall my Sword (1972)
 Two of his last publications embodied the critical sentiments of his final
years; The Living Principle: 'English' as a Discipline of Thought (1975),
and Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976).
Although these later works have been sometimes called "philosophy", it
has been argued that there is no abstract or theoretical context to justify
such a description. In discussing the nature of language and value,
Leavis implicitly treats the sceptical questioning that philosophical
reflection starts from as an irrelevance from his standpoint as a literary
critic - a position set out in his early exchange with René Wellek
(reprinted in 'The Common Pursuit').
His views on poetry
 Leavis is often viewed as having been a better critic of poetry than of the
novel in New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis attacked the Victorian
poetical ideal, suggesting that 19th century poetry sought the
consciously "poetical" and showed a separation of thought and feeling
and a divorce from the real world. The influence of T. S. Eliot is easily
identifiable in his criticism of Victorian poetry, and Leavis
 acknowledged this, saying in The Common Pursuit that, "It was Mr.
Eliot who made us fully conscious of the weakness of that tradition" In
his later publication Revaluation, the dependence on Eliot was still very
much present, but Leavis demonstrated an individual critical sense in
such a way as to place him among the distinguished modern critics. The
early reception of T. S. Eliot and the reading of Hopkins were
considerably enhanced by Leavis's proclamation of their greatness His
criticism of Milton, on the other hand, had no great impact on Milton's
popular esteem. Many of his finest analyses of poems were reprinted in
the late work, The Living Principle
His views on the novel
 As a critic of the novel, Leavis's main tenet stated that great novelists
show an intense moral interest in life, and that this moral interest
determines the nature of their form in fiction Authors within this
"tradition" were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to
the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George
Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence, but
excluded Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. In The Great Tradition
  Leavis attempted to set out his conception of the proper relation
between form/composition and moral interest/art and life. This proved
to be a contentious issue in the critical world, as Leavis refused to
separate art from life, or the aesthetic or formal from the moral. He
insisted that the great novelist's preoccupation with form was a matter
of responsibility towards a rich moral interest, and that works of art
with a limited formal concern would always be of lesser quality.
His views on the British Broadcasting Company
 He accused the corporation's coverage of English literature of lacking
impartiality, and of vulgarizing the literary taste of British society. [31] In
1931,
 Leavis took issue with a BBC series of book discussions presented
by Harold Nicolson, claiming that Nicolson's programmers lacked the
"sensitiveness of intelligence" which he believed good literary criticism
required.]Throughout his career, Leavis constantly took issue with the
BBC's motives and actions, even once jokingly referring to his "anti-
BBC complex"